Hi All,

On Friday Henter-Joyce released a public beta of Jaws for Windows (JFW)
version 3.2.  One of the key features of this update is support for
Internet Explorer version 4.01.  Full details on the public beta and
exactly which JFW users are eligible can be found on the Henter-Joyce web
site.  You'll find it at:

http://www.hj.com

What follows are some general impressions after a couple of hours exploring
this new combination.  Please understand that this is beta software and the
combination between IE 4.01 and JFW involves a lot of interaction behind
the scenes.


After spending a couple hours (thank goodness there's a restaurant close to
my home) downloading IE 4.01 I was anxious to see how the new combination
of IE 4 and JFW would work.  Like many this marked the third time I've
tried the combination, once on the initial release, once when Microsoft
released the supposed corrected version back in December and now today.

Beta software being beta software, I shouldn't have been surprised that the
first time I pressed the Tab key to explore the IE Welcome Page, my
computer made a series of interesting sounds and came to a quite literally
screeching halt.  Largely undaunted by this unfortunate turn of events, I
rebooted and fired the combination up again.  Thankfully my second press of
the Tab key on a web page yielded a much more positive sound.  Soon I was
surfing the net with IE 4.

Users of JFW 3.0 who have been browsing the web with IE 3 are not likely to
notice any major changes out of the box when browsing with IE 4.  But a
couple major improvements are only a keystroke away and my initial
impression is quite favorable.

Perhaps the most powerful enhancement is JFW's ability to reformat a web
page to a much more screen reader (largely decolumnized) display.  A visit
to Yahoo at

http://www.yahoo.com

can be quite a challenge with a screen reader and a graphical browser.
Once you get past all the links for things like Yellow Pages, Yahoo Mail
and such, you get to the heart of the service which are the Yahoo
categories.  By default these appear to be in two columns with a third
column displaying news headlines.  Sorting through this can be an
interesting task to say the least.

One press of Insert-F5 in the new release of JFW and the category section
of Yahoo is reformatted to a very screen reader friendly display.
Additionally the word "link" is inserted before any link on the page.  For
those familiar with the Lynx web browser, the display is very similar to
what you are used to reading.  For an even better example of the power of
this feature, visit

http://www.oregonlive.com

and you'll finally be able to make sense of the site.

Another new tool is the Insert-F7 key combination.  Pressing this will
present you with a list of all the links on a web page.  Simply cursor down
to the link you want or better yet, tap the first letter until you hear it
and in either case press enter.  As an example, when I get to the New York
Times, I want the Front Page.  I can simply press Insert-F7, followed By
the letter "f" and finally enter.  I then have the choice of navigating in
traditional methods or getting another list of links on the page, in this
case the headlines of the individual stories.

JFW users will also appreciate the fact that the software once again seems
to make an attempt to read the text associated with things like radio
buttons, check boxes and edit fields.  Because there's no way to associate
this text with these controls in the current version of HTML (I believe
this is a feature of 4.0) JFW has to make a guess about the closest word(s)
to a control being the prompt for the control.  In most cases the program
does an adequate job.  However, edit boxes may still be problematic on some
web sites because there's not always text near enough to the text entry
area for the program to guess correctly.

Henter-Joyce has also added a keystroke to make jumping to the first form
field i.e. text entry area, on a web page much easier.  Now when you want
to get into the edit box on Yahoo, simply press Insert-Control-Home rather
than tabbing multiple times.
IE, like most Windows software, contains a toolbar to access the most
commonly used features of the program.  Although pressing Insert-F8 brings
you to a list of all the tools on the toolbar in IE, I find this feature a
bit quirky.  I say this because in the Office suite you press ctrl-tab to
move to various toolbars after first activating the menu bar with a press
of the Alt key.  As I understand things, this is a feature of Microsoft's
Active Accessibility and perhaps similar functionality wasn't added to IE
by Microsoft.  However, as someone who spends a significant amount of time
teaching others to use computers, I am not looking forward to explaining
why different keystrokes are used to access toolbars in the Office suite
and in IE.

One of the larger changes I've noticed thus far in the IE menus, is that
the options dialog has many more entries.  Most notably Accessibility
controls appear in two places.  First under the General Tab where you can
control certain color and style sheet settings and second under the
Advanced tab where you can enable a system caret to follow you as you tab
through a web page and indicate that all the alt-text should be displayed
when present.  The system caret will not move through a web page line by
line, rather it simply allows you to focus on what IE is pointing to as you
tab through a web page.

Be aware that changing options under the Advanced tab involves cursoring
through a list of options.  They appear to be a series of check boxes,
although I could find no way to detect the status of any of these options
with JFW.  Each is preceded with a graphic that JFW does recognize but
pressing the space bar to change the status didn't result in any change of
the graphic.  However I did notice that the results did take effect or were
disabled as I experimented in this list.

You will also find the option to enable or disable image loading under the
Advanced tab of the options dialog.  It is near the end of the list under
the heading of Multimedia.

Image maps appear to work a bit better with JFW in this version.  As you
tab through the links of an image map you will hear either the underlying
URL or the text that has been associated with that link.  This latter is
clearly the better choice but requires that the web designer put the words
into the page's HTML.

Channels, information that's supposed to be automatically updated, are
another new feature of IE 4.  My initial results with this feature were
quite dismal.  I selected Microsoft's Active Channel Guide from the Go menu
and was greated with what appeared to be a blank page.  Trying the JFW
Insert-F7 key to get a list of the links on the page turned up nine links,
most of which appeared to be long lists of numbers and punctuation.  Asking
JFW to reformat the page with Insert-F5 gave me a Microsoft Script error.
I suspect the troubles in this area have as much to do with web design as
they do with the JFW software.

I started by commenting that users of JFW 3 and IE 3.02 wouldn't notice any
huge impact when they first loaded the new versions of both applications.
However, it does appear that Henter-Joyce has equipped JFW with a couple
powerful features that have promise to make the web easier to navigate.
Still unless things like good HTML design and proper alt-tagging are done,
no amount of page reformatting or link listing will matter.  This is in no
way meant to say that what Henter-Joyce has released for public beta is a
bad product.  In fact I'm favorably impressed.  It is clear that a lot of
effort has gone into JFW support of IE and I look forward to further
explorations.  In the couple hours I've explored the program, I've found
myself visiting many web sites that I'd only visit with Lynx in the past
because their layout was just to complex in earlier versions of IE.

Kelly